


anywhere. everywhere.

by moonix



Category: All For The Game - Nora Sakavic
Genre: Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternate Universe - No Exy (All For The Game), Alternate Universe - Witchcraft, Demon Summoning, M/M, Tea, Tumblr Giveaway Fic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-16
Updated: 2019-04-16
Packaged: 2020-01-15 03:29:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18490408
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/moonix/pseuds/moonix
Summary: In a moment of desperation, Neil summons a demon to protect him from his father - and gets a little more than he bargained for.





	anywhere. everywhere.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Avengerz](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avengerz/gifts).



> Written for Taylor for my Tumblr fic giveaway. I asked for a prompt, a tea, and the recipient's favourite colour. Taylor's prompt was "neil’s desperate attempts to escape his father includes trying to summon a demon/ghost/angel/otherworldly force. it's andrew. gayness and magic ensues", the tea was Nepali black tea with a shit ton of sugar, and the colour was purple. I had fun with this - I don't think I've ever written a demon AU before, actually.
> 
> (There's a little bit of Nathan-related nastiness in the beginning but I don't think it qualifies for an explicit violence warning.)

Neil’s hands shake as he finishes drawing the summoning circle on the ground. The last rune shivers sideways and a trail of chalk dust marches over one side of the circle like irreverent cat paws, but Neil is out of time; he needs to conjure this thing, now.

He wipes the sweat from his brow and plunges his hands into the circle. They’re still bloody, courtesy of Lola’s knives, and he hisses at the pain when he presses his ruined palms to the cold floor. The incantation drips from his mouth in thick globs, the language viscous and heavy on his tongue, his mother’s voice echoing in his ears. It’s the first time he’s tried this on his own since she died. He might not even be strong enough, but at this point he has nothing to lose. The building is surrounded. Lola’s body is bleeding out in a corner. His father is prowling outside, waiting for her to drag him out kicking and screaming, and it won’t be long before he realises something is off.

The words start to congeal in his mouth and Neil has to fight to keep speaking them. Nausea rushes through him and it gets harder to breathe. For a moment the world seems to tilt upside-down, the inexorable pull on Neil’s hands the only thing keeping him tethered to the ground, and then it slams back upright, jarring him to the bone. Blood starts to drain from the cuts in his hands, seeping into the chalk and setting it aglow. Like a fuse, it travels along the runes until the circle is complete, fizzling and smouldering and filling Neil’s lungs with a sweet, smoky scent.

He reaches the end of the incantation. Nothing happens.

“Help me,” he whispers, furiously searching his mind for anything he might have forgotten. “Please.”

Purple smoke billows from the smudged runes and makes him cough. When it’s gone, a boy sits cross-legged inside the circle, one elbow braced lazily on his knee. He’s chewing gum and regarding Neil with hooded eyes.

“I don’t like that word,” he says.

Neil struggles to swallow down the last of the nausea.

“What?”

“Rule number one, you don’t say the p-word around me. This is non-negotiable. And I don’t do sexual favours, so if that’s why you summoned me, you can fuck right off.”

“No,” Neil says weakly, unsticking his bloody hands from the floor. “I… I need protection.”

The boy seems to perk up a bit. He sweeps his gaze over the bare room, lingering over the slumped body in the corner.

“Did you kill her?”

“Yes,” Neil says. He’s too exhausted to pretend at remorse, but then he supposes an otherworldly being that gets summoned to do other people’s bidding won’t judge. Probably.

“Interesting. So you need protection from, what, law enforcement?”

“My father,” Neil croaks. “He’s going to kill me.”

“You’re really shit at drawing circles, did you know?” the boy hums, casually smearing chalk dust over the floor. He looks… ordinary. Not like a powerful spirit at all. The knees of his black jeans are ripped, his boots scuffed; there are bags under his eyes that just look tired instead of evil. His blond hair curls this way and that in vaguely devious shapes, but there are no horns or wings or anything of the sort that Neil can see.

“Can you or can you not help me?” Neil asks, resigned. Figures he wouldn’t be able to conjure a fully-fledged demon like his mom. At least a demon in training, or whatever this one is, is better than none at all. Hopefully.

His father chooses that moment to break down the door with his cleaver. Neil had tossed a quick locking spell at it earlier, but every trace of magic ingrained in the wood simply crumbles and splinters under the blunt force.

Neil scrambles to his feet, woozy from blood loss and the effort of conjuring, and slips his last dagger from its hiding place in his shoe. He doesn’t normally use this one for fighting—it used to be his mother’s, and it’s the last thing of hers he has left. But desperate times call for desperate measures, and if he’s going to die here he might as well go down swinging.

His father steps idly into the room and regards the crumpled heap on the floor that used to be his most loyal lieutenant.

“You’ll pay for this,” he says. There’s no anger in his voice; he is merely stating a fact. Neil is about to tell his failed experiment to get the hell out, but when he turns his head the boy and the circle have already disappeared. Neil presses his lips into a grim line and tries to grope around for the last remnants of magic inside him. Nothing. He’s completely spent. He has just enough energy left to hope that the end will be quick, even though he knows it won’t.

“Well? What should we start with?” Nathan muses, testing the blades of his cleavers against his fingertips. “Your legs, I think. As fun as it has been to chase you and the mutt down, the fox hunt ends here.”

Neil’s eyes desperately scan the barren walls for an escape out of the warehouse. He flinches back from the first swing of a cleaver, not even paying attention where he goes, and finds himself cornered already. His father easily knocks the dagger from his hand and it skids uselessly across the ground, out of his reach. The amethyst handle winks tiredly in the dust.

“Pathetic,” Nathan snarls, and lifts his cleaver.

It’s the last word he says. Blood is spurting from his throat before Neil’s brain can consolidate what he knows—that he’s going to die, as sure as the sun is going to rise—with what he sees before him. The bulk of Nathan’s body hides the smaller one behind him. A hand grips the dagger—Neil’s dagger—and pulls it out, leaving behind a gaping hole. Nathan gurgles and tries for breath, comes up empty. One cleaver lands on the floor as his hand goes to his neck, trying to stem the blood. He drops down on his knees and his eyes go wide, the blue colour bleached almost bone-grey in the dim light.

In death, he doesn’t look so much like Neil.

“Ta-da,” the demon boy says, dry and crisp. “There, done. Now I can go back to my hot chocolate, which is going to be cold, thank you very much, and you can go back to—whatever it was you were doing. Crawling around in a dumpster, by the looks of it.”

“Wait,” Neil says, still staring at the pool of blood spreading on the floor. It reaches the tips of his sneakers and he hastily trips away from it, leaning against the wall. He’s shaking worse than before now and his breath is coming out in tight wheezes, like laughter gone sour.

“I—let me buy you a hot chocolate, at least,” he manages.

*

The boy’s name turns out to be Andrew.

“Not very demonic,” Neil says, shoving fries in his mouth. They’ve ended up at a crappy, rundown diner with unidentifiable stains on the tables and flickering lights that buzz like flies. There’s an out-of-season plastic Christmas tree in one corner, garishly purple with neon pink string lights that blink on and off. The stuffing is coming out of the bench Neil is sitting on, but at least he’s sitting and the food is good. Well—there’s food. That counts for something.

“Might be because I’m not a demon,” Andrew quips, sticking his tongue out to lap at the mound of whipped cream on his second hot chocolate. Neil gulps down the rest of his tea—black, with plenty of sugar to restore some wits. It tastes like someone scraped up the tea dust left over at the bottom of the cheapest box of black tea and poured lukewarm water on it. Luckily, not being picky about what he eats and drinks is one of Neil’s many talents these days, thanks to years of living in the street.

“So, what are you then?” Neil asks, curious.

“Self-employed,” Andrew shrugs.

“Ah,” Neil says, not really understanding but too tired to pry any further. He crams the last of his fries into his mouth and leans back, picking at the bandages on his hands. He cleaned and wrapped them in the dingy bathroom earlier, but they’re already starting to unravel again. His magic is still too exhausted to attempt any sort of healing spell though, so they will have to do.

Andrew sees him eyeing his half-eaten burger and pushes it across the table to him.

“I said I’d treat you,” Neil mutters sullenly even as he takes a bite. “We’re hardly even if I eat your food.”

Andrew snorts. He’s finished with his hot chocolate, but he keeps chewing on the straw with the desperation of someone biting their nails or picking at scabs.

“You think buying me cheap food is equal to me killing your psychopathic axe-murderer of a father for you?”

“If you put it that way,” Neil says and puts the rest of the burger in his mouth. “I gave you my blood and my magic though. That’s how that works, right?”

“Don’t tell me you summoned me without reading the terms and conditions first.”

“I was kind of in a hurry,” Neil grins sheepishly. “Is this a bad time to tell you I don’t actually have any money?”

Andrew fixes him with a piercing stare. The straw drips onto the table. One of Andrew’s hands is curled loosely next to his glass like a wilting flower. Bruises climb his knuckles in faded purple and yellow and scars creep along his skin like marks left behind on a wall by tendrils of ivy. Neil knows an abandoned building when he sees one, and Andrew is the kind that his mother warned him never to enter lest the whole unsound structure comes crashing down on him.

Neil picks up his empty mug, turns it over in his hand a few times and puts it back down. He reaches for the sugar and upends the container on the table, pushing the grains around and shaping them into a vague approximation of runes.

“How do you feel about a more permanent engagement?”

*

The deal goes like this: Andrew helps Neil get the hell out of Baltimore where his father’s men are still roaming and to his uncle’s coven in London. It’s not ideal, and Neil is probably going to want to kill Stuart with his bare hands roughly two seconds into his stay there, but at least it’s far away and a place where he can safely lie low and regroup. And, for all his faults, Stuart can always be counted on to have good tea.

In return, Andrew gets to leech some of Neil’s magic—Neil still hasn’t figured out what exactly he is, and when Neil unwisely asked if he was some kind of incubus Andrew put salt in his tea for a week. Neil is trying to be a bit subtler about his guessing process now.

There are other, smaller deals as well, because Andrew really seems to like them and Neil enjoys bartering with him. Sometimes they exchange truths, sometimes they’ll trade less serious things, like a squashed chocolate bar Neil finds in his bag for Andrew cutting his hair for him. The last time Neil got a haircut was when his mom was still around, so it’s probably high time.

It takes a while to arrange everything. Neil leads them on a circuitous route across the country, hotwiring cars and stealing money and credit cards to buy Greyhound tickets for them both. He makes a cheeky comment about how Andrew should just save him the expense and fly there with his non-existent demon wings, and Andrew plucks the Styrofoam cup of tea from his hands and drains the scalding hot liquid all in one go.

“Did that hurt?” Neil asks, smirking.

“A lot,” Andrew deadpans and shoves the empty cup back in his hand.

Some nights, neither of them sleeps. Neil has nightmares and Andrew has insomnia, so they sit together under a blanket and share a cigarette stub. Neil tries to shape the smoke into runes and Andrew bats his hands away. Smiling, Neil hooks his foot under Andrew’s leg and they kick and shove against each other for a while, like a reverse game of footsie, until the first thin paintwater light of the morning spills purple hues on their skin.

Neil draws the runes in the margins of his sketchbook, onto the lining of Andrew’s backpack and into the upturned ends of his jeans. He’d draw them on Andrew himself if Andrew would allow it. Andrew hates him for it—this is still very much a deal for him, a balanced give and take where Neil willingly flinging the doors wide open for Andrew only upsets the scales.

“What if someone else figures out how to use them?” Andrew asks him, pressing down on the rune that Neil carved into the sole of his boot like pressing down on a bruise to see if it still hurts.

“Not possible,” Neil says. “The runes only work for the intended recipient, they’re useless to anyone else. You’re the only one who can tap into them.”

“Don’t,” Andrew says, bitter and low like tea gone cold. “Don’t squander your magic on me.”

“I’m not,” Neil says simply. “I’m giving it to you. There’s a difference.”

*

The airport is an uninspiring slab of concrete surrounded by more uninspiring slabs of concrete. The sky behind it is a gradient of new and old bruises, the setting sun a thick, circular burn scar on the horizon. Neil inhales the smoke of their last shared cigarette and watches as it smoulders down to the filter, its glow stark against the muted pastels of evening light.

“I can’t wait for my first real cup of tea,” Neil jokes. He can already taste it on his tongue—the Nepalese highland blend his uncle favours is fragrant and rich, with hints of mountain herbs and spices unfolding in the back of his mouth. Or maybe that’s just nostalgia Neil is tasting, and the reality will be just as flat and sparse as the travesty that the airport coffee shop is selling under the presumptuous moniker of English Breakfast.

“Or,” Andrew says slowly, grinding the cigarette into the dirt with his heel, “you could stay.”

“Stay?” Neil laughs. “Where, here?”

He indicates the wasteland of the airport with one hand, but Andrew catches it and guides it to his lips. Carefully, precisely, he draws a rune on the back of Neil’s hand with his tongue.

“With you?” Neil asks, throat tight. “Where would we go?”

Andrew shrugs.

“Anywhere. Everywhere.” He looks down at their still entwined fingers and frowns. “I have a… former client. He asked for protection, like you. I took him to the Foxhole. We could stay there for a bit—he owes me a favour.”

“The Foxhole Coven?” Neil echoes, surprised. “I don’t know, Andrew…”

“Stay,” Andrew says again, and it sounds like _please_.

“Well, if you put it that way,” Neil says.

*

The Foxhole Coven is small and shabby, but after a few weeks it already feels like home. Neil still has nightmares and Andrew still smokes more than he sleeps, but their room is theirs alone. Kevin, Andrew’s former protégé, has taken it upon himself to train Neil's haphazard magic while Andrew goes off to spar with Renee.

“Is she also, you know,” Neil asks one night when they’re curled up in bed together, safe in a cocoon of hand-drawn runes. “Self-employed?”

“Yes,” Andrew says, and: “Stop talking.”

It takes some time and negotiating to work up to kissing, but once they do, it’s even harder to stop.

Some days they sit at the open window in their bedroom, dangling their legs and looking out across the mountain range that stands between them and the rest of the world. Some days Andrew gets summoned and goes away for a while, and Neil sucks runes into his neck to bring him home safe and sound. He throws himself into his work at the coven while Andrew’s gone and Andrew usually brings back new teas for Neil to try, and it’s not so bad, all things considered.

Not bad at all.

“About those sexual favours,” Neil says one day when Andrew has him pressed against the door. His body runs hot all the time, which seems to be about as attractive to the local cats as it is to Neil. One of them is currently rubbing around their tangled legs, supremely unconcerned with whatever they are in the process of doing.

“No,” Andrew says.

“I know,” Neil hums. “I did finally read those terms and conditions, you know. I just mean, outside of our deal…”

“Not because of that,” Andrew huffs, pointing at their legs. Their feline guest has curled up on top of Andrew’s left foot and seems to be fast asleep. Neil stares at the furry black lump for a moment and has to muffle a laugh in Andrew’s t-shirt.

He can’t believe he ever thought of Andrew as an abandoned house. He’s more like the sunshine trickling through boarded-up windows, keeping everything alive.

His hand finds Andrew’s and he traces another rune into the crook of his palm; its shape like a key, invisible and sure.

“Stay?” he asks.

“Looks like I don’t have much of a choice,” Andrew mutters, glancing down at the cat.

“Yes you do,” Neil says. “You always have a choice.”

“Well,” Andrew says, “if you put it that way…”

**Author's Note:**

> If you like my content, consider leaving kudos and/or a comment, subscribe to me here on AO3 or check out my Tumblr ([annawrites](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/))!
> 
> You can also reblog the post from [here](https://annawrites.tumblr.com/post/184232440584/chapters-11-fandom-all-for-the-game-nora) and check out a collage I made to go with the fic.


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